26 - Rosalba Carriera (Venice 1673–1757), student/associate of

Rosalba Carriera (Venice 1673–1757), student/associate of Portrait of a Nobleman in Armor Pastel on paper 60 x 49 cm Rosalba Carriera is among the greatest artists of 18th-century Europe. She is considered the greatest female artist of all time. Her style offers the most perceptive and penetrating insight into 18th-century Venetian and European society and was fundamental to the development of French portraiture. Through her portraits, she explored in an unparalleled way the ideals of grace and elegance of an era: the swan song of European nobility itself, which, a few decades later, would lose its status within a society transformed by the ideas of the French Revolution. Raised to cultivate the arts, as was customary for young women of the time, Rosalba and her two sisters studied music, literature, painting, embroidery, and foreign languages. Rosalba soon devoted herself to the study of painting, particularly miniatures and portraits. Having become famous for the delicacy of her miniatures, she began to portray the most prominent figures of the era using the pastel technique, in which she excelled in Europe. Thanks to the extremely subtle shading and strokes of pure color that this technique allows, her patrons found in her works both an extreme delicacy in the velvety skin tones and the realistic precision of the details. Thanks to her success and her knowledge of languages, she was welcomed at courts throughout Europe, where she enhanced her reputation by painting miniatures and portraits for royal families and the court nobility. She died in Venice at just over eighty years of age on April 15, 1757, after a decade of suffering due to blindness. Thanks to her, an entire generation of artists—often women—dedicated to pastel portraiture emerged: Giovanna and Angela Carriera, Felicita Sartori Hoffmann, Margherita Terzi, Marianna Carlevarijs, and Gianantonio Lazzari. Rosalba Carriera (Venice 1673–1757) pupil/circle of Portrait of a Nobleman in Armor Pastel on paper 60 x 49 cm